Beyond the Buzz: Community
Everyone's talking about community, but few brands are getting it right. Let's decode what community really means and why most are missing the mark.
Welcome to Beyond the Buzz, where we decode the buzzwords echoing through every meeting room and brand deck from here to the beauty counter. You know the ones 👀 —those perfectly polished phrases your marketing team is guaranteed to use at least three times in a presentation.
Living that double life of strategist-slash-shopper, I often wonder: do these words actually deliver, or are they just smoke and mirrors? (spoiler: there's plenty of both). Each week, we'll unpack one of these marketing darlings, along with receipts 🧾 on who's walking the talk and who's just adding to the noise.
Everything Can’t Be Community.
These days, it feels like I can’t escape that word. It’s plastered across brand decks, popping up on e-mail sign-up forms, and headlining every other industry article. I’ve seen it used so much that it’s starting to lose meaning, like when you say a word too many times and it stops sounding like a real thing.
And honestly? Maybe it’s because, in a lot of cases, it isn’t.
Communities have existed far longer than the internet, but the Oxford Handbook of Internet Psychology offers a definition that still resonates in our social-first, hyper-connected world. It describes a community as a group of individuals who:
💌 Have strong, collective relationships that intertwine and reinforce one another.
🤝 Share values or a cultural identity they’re committed to actively shaping together.
💬 Share a repertoire of vocabulary, routines, and concepts, developed through mutual engagement in a common purpose.
The way brands use community, though, feels different. The word is often stretched thin, used seemingly interchangeably with customers or followers. For many, it boils down to driving cross-channel engagement, securing customer loyalty (preferably with their wallets 😉), and cultivating word-of-mouth advocacy.
This rebranding of community into a transactional concept is the antithesis of its deeper, sociological meaning where relationships, culture, and shared purpose take precedence. It feels less like a community and more like a strategy, and that’s where the word loses its meaning.
I Get the Appeal: Real Communities Are Thriving.
When I think about thriving beauty communities, I inevitably think about Reddit. Let's talk about r/SkincareAddiction for a minute: over three million members sharing their holy grail products (that’s community verbiage right there), commiserating over breakouts, and deep-diving into ingredient lists to figure out why that new face wash is making OP’s face angry.
That subreddit raised me, and it’s become one of the most influential spaces in beauty without a single brand guideline or content calendar in sight. The relationships are reciprocal, the knowledge sharing is genuine, and most importantly, there's trust.
When someone on Reddit says a £300 serum broke them out, they're not worried about losing affiliate commissions. When they're praising a £7 moisturizer, they're not getting paid to do it. It's just real people sharing real experiences, creating what brands wish for but are rarely able to manufacture: authentic influence.
Arguably, I’d say no social media platform thus far has done quite as good of a job at building community, but we have to give credit where it’s due and acknowledge that this isn’t just happening on Reddit.
Scroll through BeautyTok (or any one of TikTok’s many other Toks) and you'll find yourself in a large community that nests - just like a matryoshka doll set - several mini-communities formed around specific aesthetics, techniques, or shared frustrations. Users converse about their experiences in the comment section, create response videos sharing their £0.02, and pass recommendations to friends through DMs.
They're active participants in cultural conversations, speaking their own languages ("skin cycling era," anyone?), creating inside jokes, and influencing purchasing decisions more effectively than most marketing campaigns.
The power of these organic communities is undeniable:
💳 A single Reddit thread or viral video can turn an obscure Japanese sunscreen into a cult favourite.
🧪 A TikTok hashtag can suddenly make an unconventional skincare ingredient standard formulation practice.
💄 And I know you’ve seen how quickly a random lip oil can go from unknown to waitlist-only just because the community collectively deemed it worthy.
As marketeers, we strive to build communities as a way of increasing our brand’s influence.
Mass media gave us reach, personalized targeting increased our effectiveness, and now our KPI-driven brains know that community often translates to:
📲 Actively engaged followers that don’t have us desperately typing CTAs in every post
💸 A high conversion rate, especially driven by recurring purchases (hard not to love those lower acquisition costs) and often featuring higher AOVs
📢 Buyers who love our brand so much that they go out of their way to get merch advertising it
🗣️ … if they do that, just imagine the raving reviews they give us when they’re speaking to their friends
📸 So much UGC. All the UGC. More UGC than content we produce.
Most Brand ‘Communities’ Feel Like Anything BUT
Unfortunately, it’s easier said than done. When was the last time a brand-moderated Facebook group accomplished that? I've spent more hours than I care to admit lurking in brand-built communities, and something about them just feels... off.
Curious about whether this was just my marketing brain being overly critical, I did what any data-obsessed strategist would do: I went digging. Scraping data to compare activity between Sephora's official Beauty Insider Community and their unofficial, consumer-led subreddit, I analysed engagement patterns from January 1st to 23rd, 2025.
Despite the Beauty Insider Community boasting over 6 million members (a whopping 572% more than the subreddit's relatively modest 893k), the unofficial space was markedly more active. It generated almost 200 more discussion threads, garnered 62k upvotes compared to just 695 likes distributed across the official platform, and - most tellingly - sparked 20.3k comments versus the 2k in Sephora's managed space.
This disparity made me realise that our community-building strategies may leave a few things to be desired. Consider Sunday Riley's Facebook group, where members are instructed to tag their posts with #PostingForPoints to activate their rewards.
At first glance, the engagement looks healthy - people are posting regularly, after all. But when I took a closer look it was hard not to wonder: would these conversations happen without the points incentive? Are we fostering genuine connections, or just creating a sophisticated loyalty program?
Back to Sephora: I found a telling example of this tension in a Beauty Insiders Community thread. When the brand announced a new ranking system for forum participation, one member questioned whether higher ranks would translate to free products for testing, stating they would "only contribute more if [they] would be getting free products lol. Or discounts!"
The responses were mixed. Some empathized, agreeing that Sephora should provide incentives for reviews. One user pointedly characterized them as "free marketing labor with nothing in return but the 'good vibes' of participating." Others pushed back, arguing that reviews should be driven by a desire to help fellow beauty enthusiasts make informed purchasing decisions, not personal gain.
This exchange highlights a key challenge in building genuine brand communities: rewards and incentives are great, but they can't be the only thing holding the community together. They need to feel like natural extensions of the community experience, designed to acknowledge loyal customers’ authentic participation while fostering, not forcing genuine connections.
In consumer-led spaces like Reddit or TikTok, people share freely because there's a sense of genuine reciprocity - they're giving back to a community they've benefited from. The platform itself feels neutral, democratic even. But in brand-built spaces, that dynamic shifts. Consumers are increasingly aware that their engagement, reviews, and content create significant value for brands - the same brands spending millions on influencer partnerships while offering their most loyal customers virtual badges.
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Watching this dynamic play out across different brand spaces is even more fascinating. While Sephora, as a retailer, can at least foster discussions about multiple brands, most brand-specific communities face an even bigger challenge: how do you build a genuine community around a single brand when consumers' beauty journeys naturally span several products and companies?
Some Brands Are Getting It Right(ish)
How do we even measure if a brand is "doing community right" when we can barely agree on what community means? I've been wrestling with this question throughout my research, and while I'm not about to claim I've found the end-all-be-all, I figured we could at least start with those three criteria from the Oxford Handbook as a framework to guide this exploration: 💌 strong relationships, 🤝 shared values, and 💬 common language.
After diving into countless brand communities, one kept catching my attention: Topicals. The beauty industry's Gen-Z prodigy (founder Olamide Olowe became the youngest Black woman ever to raise over $2 million in venture funding at just 26) found their loyalists by continuously saying no to the fear of being polarizing.
Instead of trying to build a community for everyone, they've explicitly prioritised people with chronic skin conditions, culture enthusiasts, and those whose mental health has been affected by their skin concerns. Other customer segments might go along for the ride, but Topicals won't dilute their message for that purpose. This focused approach gives their community a stronger emotional foundation and clearer shared purpose, helping them create spaces where these specific experiences and frustrations can be openly discussed.
📲 Online: Topicals connects with their audience through what seems like the most predictable move in the playbook: another brand community platform (I see your influence, Sephora 😉). Except instead of launching another broadcast channel or forum with participation badges, they're gamifying engagement through the TYB platform, where members earn actual, tangible rewards - think discounts and event invites - for things they'd do anyway, from dropping Instagram comments to voting on future products.
Monthly Zoom meetings bring members together, and when they discovered that 5% of their community members were estheticians, they created a dedicated segment just for these professionals to connect and share expertise (personally, I'm waiting for them to launch business incubators for this community - imagine the possibilities).
🗺️ Offline: the brand hosts regular events across the U.S., from pickleball matches to dance classes, creating room for real-world connections. Their brand trips mix everyday customers with influencers - taking the industry’s recent refreshing departure from the typical creator-only getaway a step further by breaking down that usual hierarchy between the ‘influencer’ and the ‘influenced’.
Even their collaborations with talent favour long-term partnerships over one-offs, maintaining authenticity in their broader community approach.
How do I know it’s working? Well, those under-eye masks that most would save for their bathroom mirror are proudly worn to errands, events, and photoshoots by Topicals' community.
We’re yet to see such a confident public display of other brands' traditionally ‘private’ skincare products. It's become the Topicals version of a band tee: a signal to others who might share similar experiences.
It's that same phenomenon we see with Rhode’s lipgloss phone cases - you know, how spotting another person with one gives you that instant "we'd probably get along" feeling. Sure, there are dupes of both products, but they don't hit quite the same as repping the original. It's not just about the product anymore; it's about the social capital that comes with being part of that community.
As Olamide put it: "A community is a citizenship to your brand world. If you're French, if you're Nigerian... you feel a sense of entitlement to that country. You feel like it owes you something, but you also feel like you owe it something." This reciprocal relationship - where the brand and its community members feel mutual investment - might be the closest we've gotten to those three markers of a ‘true’ community.
Are We Sure Branded Spaces Are the Better Way Forward?
Let's talk about TYB for a minute. It's an app that hosts multiple brand communities - think Topicals, Rare Beauty, and others - all under one roof. Instead of bouncing between various brand forums and Discord servers, fans can join discussions, share content, and chat with each other all in one place. Think of it as a social platform where you actually get rewarded for your doomscroll.
Honestly? It's pretty clever.
From a marketer's perspective (trust me, I've done the Discord/Instagram group chat grind), the platform streamlines everything from challenge creation to reward distribution, helps track engagement metrics, and even integrates with existing e-commerce platforms. No more juggling multiple tools or manually tracking participation, though I'm curious how this would work for retailer-first brands. I imagine getting retailers on board would be crucial for any non-D2C brand wanting to offer these kinds of integrated rewards.
But while platforms like TYB show promise, I can't help wondering if we're still missing the bigger picture. The contrast between Sephora's forum struggles and Reddit's organic success gives hints that maybe the future isn't about building better branded spaces, but about brands becoming better participants in existing communities.
The Oxford Handbook of Internet Psychology offers an interesting perspective here: communities are built on actors exchanging both tangible and intangible resources. The more value an actor provides - whether through information, support, or tangible benefits - the more influence and prestige they gain in the network. Strong ties form when these exchanges become reciprocal.
See where I'm going with this? Instead of trying to build communities from scratch, brands could focus on being valuable actors in existing ones.
What might this look like in practice? Beyond the basics of gifting viral content creators or thanking advocates in comments (though yes, do that too), imagine:
💄 A makeup brand stitching a viral TikTok where someone's struggling with red lipstick, educating them about the various undertones of red, and sending them a curated selection to help them find their perfect match. No overt product plugs, just genuine advice (and if they end up choosing your product? Great! If not, you've still added value by helping users solve a pain point common enough to go viral)
👩🏻💻Brand employees participating in Reddit forums as part of the rising EGC (Employee-Generated Content) trend, not to promote, but to offer genuine advice and escalate customer service issues without the corporate speak.
💌 Engaging in comment sections like actual humans, not automated response bots, creating genuine back-and-forth with both creators and other brands that feel more like a group chat than a customer service email
🎁 Surprising active community members with gifts or early access, not just as part of a structured program, but as a genuine token of appreciation for their contributions
The approach will vary by brand (ELF's entertainment value hits differently than Topicals' educational content), but the principle remains: add value first, and the influence will follow.
The key is consistency. These can't be one-off initiatives. Real community integration needs to be a core pillar of brand strategy, backed by dedicated resources and regular investment.
There's a strategic advantage here too. The Oxford Handbook notes that while shared viewpoints make communities comfortable, they need "input of new ideas associated with transient, weaker tie connections" to thrive. By participating in existing communities instead of building echo chambers, brands gain better social listening, trend spotting, and cultural influence.
Unfortunately, current brand attempts at community integration often feel shallow. Jumping on TikTok trends with the same sounds and formats everyone else is using and creating "relatable" content that's been done a thousand times is just creating noise. There's no unique perspective or real contribution to the conversation. Brands have more resources than individual community members; so if we want them to connect with us, we need to use them to actually enrich these spaces rather than just extracting value from them.
Tools like TYB are likely to become essential for brand community management moving forward - they solve real pain points for both brands and consumers. But having a dedicated space to help your loyalists connect doesn't negate the need for broader community integration. These aren't competing strategies; they're complementary approaches to building deeper, more meaningful relationships with consumers.